How to Use Pull Techniques to Attract Talents to You

Companies want to attract talents, they go to great lengths and invest considerable resources while approaching them, but when the opportunity presents itself, for some reason, they fail to close the deal or even to raise their interest, to begin with.

Why is this happening?

The logical flow should be simple after all:

> They want a job.

> And you want to hire great people.

Ergo it should be pretty straightforward, or so we assume. After a few attempts, most recruiters realize that there’s more to it than just going through the motions, hunting for real talent is not straight-forward and you need to prepare your entire recruitment onboarding process to accommodate a whole new level of employee.

Yes, if you want to add great talents to your team, you’ll have first to admit that talents aren’t your typical candidates. 

In addition, they don’t respond to everyone’s approach, they choose where to work and with whom, and the only companies that can attract talents organically are the ones who got their ‘talent magnet’ game on. Some companies have an entire architecture behind attracting talent, and it begins with a full commitment to the recruitment process, and so should you.

But, we all know that opinions vary when it comes to the recruitment process, and companies are usually divided into these two:

• Those who ask themselves ‘How can our company attract talent without all that mambo jumbo?’
• And those who ask ‘What do I need to change in order to attract talent?’

As you probably guessed by now, only the later will be able to attract talent eventually.

Why?

Because a company that can change inspires a brand image that radiates ‘savoir-faire’, and when coupled with a strong brand image and a company culture that encourages talent development, it creates a strong mental image of the exciting challenges it offers to the brave souls that are willing to take them on their offer.

And that my friends, is worth the investment.

Creating the savoir-faire mental image in your recruits mind

Talents are game-changers. The McKinsey Global Survey, “war for talent” confirms that in highly complex positions, there is a huge productivity gap between the high and the average performers, and talents are not only better at what they do, they’re also more productive.

However, hiring a talent doesn’t mean that they become productive overnight, there’s work to be also done in that department.

Research from the top management consulting firm, Bain & Company, found after assessing the practices of global companies and surveying senior executives, that the best-performing companies have roughly the same percentage of star talents as the average company.

This is a valuable piece of information.

It is not the number of talents that makes the difference. What separates the best-performing companies from the rest is the way they use their talent’s time, knowing how to do that allows your talent’s achieve your goals, and via accomplishments, you’ll attract even more talent by proxy.

With each talent you recruit, you’ll have to develop a personalized plan to use their time effectively, this plan needs to take under account the talent’s strengths, needs and plans for the future.

When employees are nurtured, they flourish.

The role of your employer brand in attracting talent

Your average talent wants to know what they are walking into before committing, and they will not take your word for it. In our day and age, one quick search on your social media outlets will tell them everything they need to know about your company and the people working there.

If you think that not having that information available will help you to dodge a bullet, think again.

If talents are searching for information that should be available, and for some reason is nowhere to be found, they just might think that someone is trying to hide something.

According to recent research by LinkedIn, more than 75% of job seekers research the firms they want to work for and its reputation. They do so because they want to get a sense of the overall employer brand even before they apply to a job there.

As a candidate, you can get a taste of what is it like to work for a company not only via the pages the employers want you to see but also through online interactions, conversations with people that worked there and even current employees.

Ask yourself, are you celebrating your employees?

Having control over your reputation is a key ingredient in boosting your employer brand, and unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.

Beautiful quotes or filtered pictures won’t do the trick, because if your candidates only get a whiff of something fake, they’re gone.

Being authentic means:

• Showing your company’s culture.
• Sharing stories, not only success stories but also stories that your company learned from.
• And of course, putting a spotlight on your employees.

People connect emotionally to a workplace faster than logically, if you’ll give them the right gut feeling, they’re with you.

Transform your interviews into gamified challenges

Top talents are worth the effort, and investing extra in their successful recruitment is totally worth it. But what to do when candidates are so much in demand, that you can’t impress them with anything your company does?

The answer lays in offering them challenges, and to understand why this works; we’ll need to understand how human motivation works first.

Motivation can come in two forms:

• Extrinsic: the type of motivation that depends on outside rewards that usually offer some type of physical reward, but not always. For instance, you’re performing a certain task because you want to get paid for it.
• Intrinsic: they type of motivation that comes from within, we don’t need any reward to perform the type of task that gives us intrinsic rewards, the actions itself is the prize. For instance, you volunteer at the pet shelter because it makes you feel good.

Now, here’s the trick, when you offer your candidate a challenge, even a paid one, and you wrap it with game mechanics, you connect your candidate to your company and give them a win that they can talk about on social media.

Games have this power to strip people from “facades” or even control. When they play, their answers can’t be rehearsed. They improvise much more, and as a result, you get a genuine emotional response from the candidate, which makes them feel a bit vulnerable and creates a real human interaction, and when an emotional connection is established, it motivates the talent to continue this connection with you.

In addition, when they ‘win’ the game or conquer the challenge, their sense of accomplishment gets connected to the one offering them the challenge, suddenly transforming you to a focal point in their latest achievement, another powerful emotional hook.

All this excitement creates a wave of attention from social media via your talents since they went through something unique, they’ll talk about it, and expose your brand to their peer, and nothing brings talent faster than other talent talking about you.

Attracting talent isn’t an impossible task. Sure, it demands investment in your interview process, in addition to building a strong employer brand and hacking your way into connecting them emotionally to your company in what some might consider nonconventional ways. 

But it’s worth it!

“I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.

Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream….A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.“

—Steve Jobs

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